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Of maize and men, or peas and people: case histories to justify plants and other model systems

Nature Medicine volume 14, pages 1046–1049 (2008)Cite this article

One of the byproducts of molecular biology has been support for the 'model system' concept. All living organisms are based on the same genetic code, they have similar subcellular structures and they use homologous metabolic pathways. So, mechanisms can be investigated using organisms other than those in which the knowledge will be exploited for practical benefit. Model systems are particularly useful in the early discovery phase of a scientific endeavor, and recent progress in biomedical science has fully vindicated their use. Jacques Monod, for example, famously justified his work on a bacterial model system by stating that “what is true for Escherichia coli is also true for elephants.” My fellow laureates, Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, can defend the use of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans as a good model system and so I will focus on plants.

Probably the best example I could use is that of Barbara McClintock, who used corn in her Nobel Prize–winning work1. Her identification of mobile genetic elements has been enormously influential in microbiology and immunology, and continues to bear on the field of epigenetics that I refer to again below. She could have adapted Monod's aphorism to refer to maize and men. Gregor Mendel would, of course, have referred to peas and people.

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Figure 1: Robert Hooke's micrograph of cells in a sample of cork.
Figure 2: Variegation of silencing in flowers of petunia.

Richard Jorgensen

Figure 3: One of Andrew Hamilton's early RNase protection assays showing that small antisense RNA—the black smear corresponding to 22 nucleotides (nt)—was only present in plants that were silencing the target RNA.

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Acknowledgements

My research has always been a group effort. Without colleagues mentioned here and others, I would not even be considered for this prestigious Lasker Award. I would feel much more comfortable if an award could be made to a research group. Special mention is to be made of A. Hamilton for his commitment to the search for the elusive antisense RNAs. I have been fortunate to receive generous long-term funding from the Gatsby Charitable Foundation that allowed me to respond to the unexpected developments in the early days of my interest in RNA silencing and to follow them over a period of 20 years. I thank the foundation trustees for their confidence and support. R. Freedman alerted Gatsby to my existence, and I will always be grateful to him for that. Other support I have received has come from the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and from a UK Royal Society Research Professorship. Finally, I acknowledge that I am afflicted with a slightly obsessive streak that must be difficult to live with. I am thankful beyond words to those who have tolerated its consequences.

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  1. Department of Plant Sciences, David Baulcombe is Royal Society Research Professor and Professor of Botany, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EA, UK. dcb40@cam.ac.uk,

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Baulcombe, D. Of maize and men, or peas and people: case histories to justify plants and other model systems. Nat Med 14, 1046–1049 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm1008-1046

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